General questions about implementing hreflang using XML sitemap

[Telsenome]

I created another thread regarding hreflang sitemaps. However, this one is more general and doesn't cover multiple sitemaps for different localizations so I think it's reasonable creating a new thread.

We are trying to implement hreflang using XML sitemap. We have localized content for a few countries, but only 1/3 of the content is 'duplicate' localized content.

How should this be presented in the sitemap? Can we have some urls with hreflang-tags and some without?

Also, where should this be located? In the usual sitemap file at site.com/sitemap.xml or should we create a different sitemap site.com/hreflang.xml where we just paste all hreflang-info? And if it should be in /hreflang.xml - can we have the same URL twice (in both current sitemap and hreflang sitemap)?

[victor.celer]

This feature was introduced by Google. It is also supported by Yandex. The only difference I've noticed is that Yandex doen't like BOM in the sitemap encoding, while Google is OK with BOM. I'm not sure about Bing or any other search engines.

[Telsenome]

Hey @Victor Celer. What do you mean by Google specific?

[Telsenome]

Anyone that knows the answer to this? If we place all our hreflangs into a separate sitemap, /hreflang.xml - can we have the same URL in both sitemaps but it's simple in the general sitemap and contains hreflang information in the second. Like so:

In /sitemap.xml

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc></url>

Same url in /hreflang.xml

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc></url>

[Telsenome]

Thank you very much @Victor Celer. It's much appreciated that you take the time to help us out.

[victor.celer]

The last URL entry is a duplicate of the first one. Everything else looks fine.

Keep in mind that this feature is Google specific. Other search engines may not understand this format.

[Telsenome]

Thank you. Would this be the correct way of doing it?

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" <br="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"></urlset>

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate"  hreflang="de"  href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"><xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-ch" href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"><xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http: www.example.com="" english="" page.html"=""></xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http:></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url>

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/page-with-no-translations</loc></url>

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/page-with-no-translations2</loc></url>

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/page-with-no-translations3</loc></url>

<url><loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate"  hreflang="de"  href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"><xhtml:link rel="alternate"  hreflang="de-ch"  href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"><xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"></xhtml:link rel="alternate"></xhtml:link></xhtml:link></url>

[victor.celer]

Exactly, you can add the hreflang properties for some URLs, if necessary. Examples.